How to create custom audiences

- [Instructor] All right, you have your audience segmentation strategy planned. Now it's time to create your audiences. In this module, now it's important to know that this must be first party data, meaning it must be data that you collected, it can not be data that was purchased. That said, there are a ton of different ways that you might use this feature. You could upload data from events, so maybe people that bought tickets for a certain event, and they may be interested in your upcoming event. Or people that purchase only during the holidays, which are likely gift givers. Or maybe people that tend to purchase from your annual sales. All of those scenarios are tough to capture with pixel data, but custom audiences are great for that. Even beyond those, you can target cold leads or leads in the pipeline. You can use customer lists to cross sell and upsell, and to announce new products or services. There are a ton of use cases and it's super easy to use. So, all we need to do is navigate over to the audience manager. And then once we're here, we just click this plus, and we'll choose customer list. Now I highly recommend, especially for the first few times using the template, it just makes it foolproof. So if you click right here, you can download the template. Once you open this up, it's going to show you these instructions. And essentially what you really need to know is that you have to have these columns in the report, but it's okay if some of them are missing data. Essentially what they're looking for here is either an email address or a phone number for each person that you have in the list. If there are lines of data that are missing either the email address or the phone number, Google won't be able to match those. However, it doesn't hurt to have them in here. So, essentially what you'll want to do is just go ahead and delete these lines here. And then I actually have some test data that I'm just going to paste in here real quick for the purposes of speed. And as you'll see, this is all dummy data, it's not actual email addresses. And then what we would just need to do is save this, and I'm going to rename it as well. We'll save that. And then we'll just navigate back over to Google Ads. Now that we're back in Google Ads, all we have to do is just upload the file here. And then we'll give this a name, so we'll call this test list, LinkedIn learning. And then we have to certify that this is data that we collected through our own first party efforts. And that it's all in accordance with Google's match policies. So this is just dummy data, we know it's not going to match, so it's fine. By default, there is no expiration on this list. If you wanted to, you could set an expiration so that this audience wouldn't be used after a certain timeframe. For the purposes of this exercise, I'm not going to set an expiration. And then you can also add a description if you want. Then you just click upload and create lists, and then Google is going to go through that process, let you know that your list was either formatted correctly or was not formatted correctly. In this case, it was. That doesn't mean that this list is ready to target. Now they're going to try to populate this list. We know because it's dummy data that it's not going to populate. All this is telling you is that the upload was successful. It doesn't necessarily mean that the audience has yet been matched. So if we click done, we'll be able to scroll through our audiences and actually find this audience, and then we can monitor it. So we'll just scroll down to the bottom down here. Not in use, in this section, and then we'll see it here. And so of course the size is zero. It shows right now that it's too small to serve. It would still be populating, so even if this was real audience data, and even if it could be matched, you would still see this immediately after your upload. It can take up to 48 hours to populate. So you'll just want to check back a few times to make sure that it's populating. And then once it gets large enough to serve, you'll be able to actually use it to deliver ads. So it's super easy to use. So take a look at your CRM and see what kind of audiences that you can create, and then start uploading those to Google Ads.